On to the post…

Ask 10 guys what the ultimate sleeper is and you’ll get 10 different answers. None of those 10 could hang with the Alfa Romeo 164 Procar.

After BMW decided to stop running the Procar support series at F1 races, Alfa Romeo proposed a series that would use cars that looked like entirely stock Alfa Romeo 164s on the outside, but were actually silhouettes with F1 chassis underneath. Because open wheel cars have inherently poor aerodynamics and already produced copious amount of downforce by the time the Procar concept was created it was actually capable of beating a contemporary F1 car in a straight line. What exactly was under the skin? A 600hp 3.5L V10 is all. Not insane power, but couple that to F1 rubber and the fact that the car would likely need ballast to meet the minimum weight for an IRL car (1,640lbs) and you have a recipe for brutal speed.

Who would suspect that such a potent package is lurking beneath the skin of a car that would appear to be the vehicle of choice for Italian septuagenarians on their way to the market even to those who know what an Alfa Romeo 164 is? The huge tires and centerlock wheels are a tiny bit of a giveaway, but imagine what it would be like to take a RWB Porsche or an MCR Skyline on the wangan in a car like that!

Pictures and specs.

I’m a big fan of the Evo X and Bulletproof has been very busy introducing ourselves to the Evo X community during the past couple of months. So what better way to show our support then to develop a new part for the community of Evo X owners!

Whats so cool I feel about the Do-Luck trunks are the integrated duckbill shape which quickly separates it from the OEM trunk visually. The duckbill shape reminds me a bit of the E46 M3 CSL, but has its own Do-Luck design flair.

Evo X owners can expect the first batch of these trunks to arrive in 3-4 months since we just recently commissioned the project and Do-Luck now is working on making the design and molds for it. For buyers in Japan, it will be sold through Do-Luck Japan. For buyers internaitonally of course it’ll be available through Bulletproof Automotive. We’ve already actually made a pre-order special page and a special extra discount to those who choose pre-order and get theirs first:

http://www.bulletproofautomotive.com/catalog-detail.php?ID=6782

For Do-Luck Evo fans, we also have 10 Do-Luck carbon front lips incoming as well. Another sure to be classic release.

All I can say with certianty is that this NSX was/is a client of Top Secret and that Top Secret had some involvement with the build/tuning of the car. Unfortunately since I was just walking around the office and snapping pics, I wasnt able to get a spec list on this car. However spec list or not, it becomes quite clear looking at the pictures that this is a serious street/circuit tuned NSX. Some of the key points are found in the engine bay picture. Any car with a custom carbon roof scoop feeding air through a lexan hatch to a 6 individual throttle injected NSX engine must indeed be a serious car! Off of memory I think that may be a Mugen hatch setup but I could be wrong.

This car is clearly a member of “Top End” a wangan crew in Japan with some really hardcore cars and members. If you look up and can find more info on Top End you’ll undoubtedly see some other nasty NSX wangan attackers and maybe even a Porsche or two!

I hope you enjoy the pics which I’ve been sitting on for years and are released here for the first time.

PS: we have some great links in the comments section including  a youtube video of other team Top End NSX’s from my buddy Mike’s old Grip Video.

Here’s a link to some of the team Top End’s rides:

http://www.gem.hi-ho.ne.jp/aceone/membertop/member2.htm

Today I was shocked to find my local Starbucks serving Pinkberry! Being a Pinkberry fan, naturally I had to try one of these new drinks they call call Sorbetto. Basically they’re a Pinkberry smoothie and then they add Naked brand Juice to it to flavor it. Anyway, after trying one I must say it wasnt anything special. Still not as good as Pinkberry in standard form with the fruit toppings, but on par with the Pinkberry smoothies that Pinkberry offers (which are equally so-so).

All in all its an interesting solution from Starbucks which lately has been being pretty beaten down financially and cutting back stores. Pretty soon I might start calling them Starpennies if the trend of downsizing continues.

Anyway, I dont know if this is just a local thing or what with the Pinkberry invasion into Starbucks stores…but its a good idea and makes plenty of sense since Harold Schultz became an investor in Pinkberry a few months back (I was curiously waiting for some sort of collaboration between the two brands).

Now I’ll be waiting for Coffee Bean to partner up with Red Mango (Pinkberry’s arch nemisis). For the past year we’ve had the frozen yogurt wars in So Cal with everyone and their moms opening up a Pinkberry knockoff. I want to see that froyo war merged with the coffee war for a mega coffee-froyo epic battle.

The Sl65 AMG Black Series by Mercedes-Benz is not JDM by a classic definition, yet the way the car was tuned embodies what high end JDM tuning is all about, which is indeed what this blog is all about. If you owned an already great car and wanted to modify it, what could be better than a widebody with 70mm wider fenders and integrated diffusers, a dry carbon roof conversion with a seemlessly integrated roll cage, a V12 Twin Turbo engine, a 550lb weight reduction, and all of the countless other sick nasty modifications that Mercedes-Benz unleashed on their already crazy SL55 and 65s.

The SL65 AMG Black was already well hyped up in my own head for some time now…Since for the first time Benz got a little hardcore on us all with their Black Series debut roughly a year ago I became really intersted in their next generation Black Series cars. Although the styling is still quite German, the methodology of modifying from a “regular” AMG to the Black Series doesnt differ too much from what Japanese greats like Amuse or others would prefer to do if it were their own project. And hate it all you want, aside from Top Secret’s Supra we’re not going to be seeing many V12 Twin Turbo Japanese tuned cars due to the lack of available Japanese V12 engines.

In short a V12 Twin Turbo carbon widebody tuned car should be equally impressive to us all as a driving machine, whether it be tuned by Smoky Nagata or a large factory like AMG. From an artistic perspective however, the allure of the “one-off” can never be matched by a mass produced vehicle. In that respect, I think we can all agree that the Top Secret V12 Twin Turbo Supra is still more impressive than the Sl65 AMG because of the custom craftwork that went into building a truely one-off machine.

We did an early debut of the SL65 Black Series in May with Jon Sibal’s concept image on this blog. That concept ended up being incredibly close to the final car, which is incredible in itself! See it below:

http://www.bespokeventures.com/blog/?p=682

Here are the juicy photos in 1920 resolution of the real deal:

EDIT: Thanks for the quick comment. This strange find is the UniMog. So I found a couple more UniMog variants. Enjoy.

And just for hilarity’s sake:

I knew roughly how rare and valuable the car was at that time, but after doing a little more research I found that the odds of me seeing this car was infact even more unlikely than I thought. Produced between 1967 and 1970, Toyota only made 351 of them worldwide. The car became famous as the first major Japanese super car and as (from what I know to be true) the only ever Japanese made “Bond Car” from the James Bond movies. It seems these cars in good condition like this one often sell for prices in the $300,000 USD range.

(by the way, even more odd than me running across this car was the fact that this is a left hand drive version)

I’ve left the pics in hi-res for you to get a look at this unique find.

For more info on the 2000GT check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_2000GT

Everyone in Japan is talking about the Vspec version of the R35 GT-R lately. There’s lots of different stories but the two things that I think I can trust at this point is that it’ll be released in Japan in time for Tokyo Auto Salon 2009 (by the end of this year at the latest) and that it’s price will cost roughly 10,000,000 JPY. Also I’ve been hearing from multiple sources that it (or some variants of it) will come with no rear seats. Rays is busy preparing a new wheel for the Vspec which will be even lighter than the current Rays built wheel on the standard GT-R. Power seems to be approx 600ps from multiple sources as well. I suspect there will be a change or major update to the transmission on this model, which may trickle down to the standard spec models as well.

Thats all the breaking news for now…

Cadillac had a special Snoop endorsed car…I move for Lotus to make this the Tommy Chong edition Lotus Elise!

Seriously…I cant make this stuff up…this is perhaps one of the coolest things I’ve ever come across. This car maintains hardcore performance, yet has cutting edge eco friendly technology. There are not many eco oriented cars at this level. Naturally the Tesla is based on the Elise but I think this concept car is more impressive than the Tesla and probably more fun to drive as well. I would have never guessed that using hemp and other eco materials would give increased performance compared to traditional methods! Talk about a win-win…

All images are 1920pix hi res, enjoy the details of this incredible concept car.

Check the Lotus Press Release on Serious Wheels:

http://www.seriouswheels.com/cars/2008/top-2008-Lotus-Eco-Elise.htm

Because of the already strong GT-R community on this blog, I’m offering exclusive access here first. This access is to view the pre-BETA release of the website. Please note that this is for firefox users only at this time. We still have a couple of bugs to work out for IE and other browsers.

We’re aiming for a public release of the BETA version of the website very soon as well (we still need to tweak browser compatibility, add more products, adjust more prices and explain more clearly about our policies and price match guarantees).

So here’s how you get the exclusive access:

go to http://stage.gt-rr.com

user name is: exclusive

password is: preview

let me know what you think….The website still has a long way to go, it’ll see major improvements over the next few months as we incorporate live GT-R only news feeds, more products, more exclusive content from GT-R tuning legends, etc.

NOTE: A lot of the text is temporary…like the tagline for the website was made by my webmaster, its a temporary tagline (and makes no sense as someone pointed out already). The actual tagline is “Bringing You More R”